New western for Battlestar’s Ronald D. Moore

Westerns sure are flavour of the month right now with ABC (US) set to develop Hangtown, from Battlestar Galactica developer/executive producer Ron Moore and Caprica writer Matt Roberts.

Described as “a Western with a procedural overlay”, Hangtown is set in the early 1900s in an American frontier town that’s begun rapidly expanding with the coming of the railroad.

The series centres on three characters: the Marshall, a Clint Eastwood type who prefers to solve crimes by his instinct; a young doctor from the East Coast who is interested in using the new field of forensics to solve crimes; and a young woman writer who is trying to sell novels to the publishing houses in New York about crime in the Wild West.

Every week the instincts of the Marshall, the science of the doctor, and the young woman’s drive to tell a rousing good yarn to her editors combine to solve crimes in a wide-open, lawless town.

ABC is also developing Gunslinger while cable network TNT has a pilot order for Gateway, set in the 1880s.